Winsor McCay is generally regarded as the first American auteur of
animation. Although not the first to experiment with animated films, McCay
achieved artistic and technical heights that established animation as a
viable form and that set ground rules for a style of pictorial illusionism
and closed figurative forms in American animated cartoons.

McCay studied art and worked as an illustrator and sign painter before
settling down in 1889 as a newspaper cartoonist in Cincinnati. His success
as a cartoonist led him to move in 1903 to the New York
Evening Telegram
. There he worked as a staff illustrator and developed the comic strips
that brought him international fame.

During the next several years, McCay created such comic strips as
Hungry Henrietta
,
Little Sammy Sneeze
,
Dream of the Rarebit Fiend
,
Pilgram's Progress
, and his most famous work,
Little Nemo in Slumberland. Little Nemo
, which ran from 1905 to 1911, is the pinnacle of comic strip art in the
first decade of the 20th century. It displays an unparalleled application
of Art Nouveau graphic style, translating sinewy, irregular forms and
rhythms into a delightfully decorative comic strip design. The strips
related the fantastic adventures which befell the child Little Nemo, who
always woke up in the last panel of the comic strip.

Sometime about 1909, McCay set to work on making an animated film of
Little Nemo in Slumberland
. (He credits his son's interest in flip books as the source of
inspiration for his cinematic experiment.) After drawing and hand-coloring
more than 4,000 detailed images on rice paper, McCay employed his animated
film in his vaudeville act while Vitagraph, the company that shot and
produced the film, simultaneously announced its release of
Little Nemo
. The animation did not employ a story but rather showed the characters of
the comic strip continuously moving, stretching, flipping, and
metamorphosing.
McCay used foreshortening and exact perspective to create depth and an
illusionistic sense of space even without the aid of any background. The
animation sequence is framed by a live-action story in which
McCay's friends scoff at the idea that he can make moving pictures
and then congratulate him when he succeeds.

The advertisements and the prologue for the film stressed the monumental
amount of labor and time required to do the drawings. McCay promoted and
flaunted not only his role as an artist but the animator's
"trade secrets." Throughout his career, McCay emphasized the
revelation of the mechanics and process of animation, a self-reflexive
approach that grew naturally out of the way he self-consciously undermined
conventions of comic strip art and constantly called attention to the form
itself.

McCay made his second animated cartoon in 1911–12.
How a Mosquito Operates
relies on a simpler, less intricately graphic style in order to tell the
story of a large mosquito's encounter with a sleeping victim. Two
years later, McCay completed the animated film for which he is most
famous,
Gertie the Dinosaur
. Like his previous two films, McCay incorporated the cartoon into his
vaudeville act and, like
Little Nemo
, Gertie's animation is framed by a live-action sequence. But in
Gertie
, McCay combined the lessons of his earlier two films in order to create a
character who is animation's first cartoon personality.

After
Gertie the Dinosaur
, McCay continued doing other animated cartoons but began utilizing
celluloid (instead of rice paper) and stationary backgrounds that did not
have to be redrawn for every frame. He also devised a system of attaching
pre-punched sheets to pegs so that he could eliminate the slight shifting
that occurred from drawing to drawing. His discovery represents the first
instance of peg registration, a technique commonly employed in modern
animation.

Although McCay's later cartoons were popular and praised for their
naturalness (
Centaurs
and
Sinking of the Lusitania
), McCay's elaborate full animation proved too time-consuming and
costly to inspire others, more concerned with production, to adhere to his
high standards. Neither a full-time animator nor part of a movie studio,
McCay was free to pursue his own ends. His success is due to his ability
to translate graphic style to animation as well as to his gregarious
showmanship.

McCay stopped making animated films in 1921, and by the time he died of a
cerebral hemorrhage in 1934, his contribution as an animator was almost
forgotten. Only in the 1960s was McCay rediscovered as an American artist.
In 1966, New York's Metropolitan Museum sponsored an exhibit of his
work.

—Lauren Rabinovitz

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